This is an education-related blog written by Mrs. Leah Obach @LeahO77. Leah is currently acting as the Literacy with ICT Teacher Leader for Park West School Division. She works with K-12 students and teachers to help them use technology for learning. Student work, teacher reflection, resources and samples from classrooms around PWSD are included in this blog.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Global Read Aloud: More than Just Reading!

We kicked off the Global Read Aloud on October 5th and we've had so much fun reading and learning together since then. The GRA is a wonderful opportunity to promote rich, deep learning while connecting and collaborating with other classrooms. Our class is interacting with classrooms in Ohio, Illinois, Virginia and Thailand to engage in a variety of activities linked to the GRA books.

Here's a sample of what we've been up to:

Making Connections
We shared our personal connections to the text Chopsticks on a digital Padlet bulletin board. Check out our ideas at the 2KG blog. It was interesting to read how other students connected to the text and their ideas even inspired more connections from our class.Vocabulary Building & Word Study
We loved our first book, Chopsticks, and reread it MANY times. We used our Daily 5/CAFE literacy strategy "Tune in to Interesting Words" to learn new vocabulary and created a Mindmeister web of words to share with our partner classrooms.

Inspired by the students in 2KG class in Thailand, we studied compound words and shared our list with our partner classrooms.

Data Collection & Graphing
We completed the 2KG online survey for Duck! Rabbit! They found out that more students thought it was a rabbit.

We also graphed our class opinions for Duck, Rabbit and shared with our partner classrooms.

In preparation for a Skype discussion with Ms. Loverde's class, we collected data and graphed our favourite book so far. When we met on Skype, each class shared their results and we found that both classes like It's Not Fair the best. Then, students from both classrooms took turns sharing which book they liked the best and why. We had a lot in common - many of us liked the same parts of books or enjoyed the books for similar reasons.

Skype Story time - a cross-classroom read aloud!
Sadly, our copy of It's Not Fair is STILL backordered.
Thankfully, we have awesome partner classrooms willing to help us out.
Mrs. Grodek and her class in Brooklyn, Ohio read the story with us on
Skype earlier this week and also recorded it for us to enjoy.

I can hardly believe that we are halfway through the Global Read Aloud! We have had so many great learning experiences so far and we are really enjoying this special author study!